THE SPECIES PROBLEM - ONGOING ISSUES Edited by Igor Ya. Pavlinov The Species Problem - Ongoing Issues http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/3313 Edited by Igor Ya. Pavlinov Contributors Richard Mayden, Kirk Fitzhugh, Igor Pavlinov, Jack W. Sites, Jr., Larissa Vasilyeva, Steven Stephenson, Richard Richards, Victor Shcherbakov, David N. Stamos, James Staley, Friedmann Vladimir Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2013 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. 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ISBN 978-953-51-0957-0 free online editions of InTech Books and Journals can be found at www.intechopen.com Contents Preface VII Section 1 Introductory 1 Chapter 1 The Species Problem, Why Again? 3 Igor Ya. Pavlinov Section 2 Conceptual Issues 39 Chapter 2 The Species Problem: A Conceptual Problem? 41 Richard A. Richards Chapter 3 Biological Species as a Form of Existence, the Higher Form 65 Victor Prokhorovich Shcherbakov Chapter 4 Defining ‘Species,’ ‘Biodiversity,’ and ‘Conservation’ by Their Transitive Relation 93 Kirk Fitzhugh Chapter 5 Transitioning Toward a Universal Species Concept for the Classification of all Organisms 131 James T. Staley Chapter 6 An Essentialistic View of the Species Problem 141 Larissa N. Vasilyeva and Steven L. Stephenson Chapter 7 Species, Trees, Characters, and Concepts: Ongoing Issues, Diverse Ideologies, and a Time for Reflection and Change 171 Richard L. Mayden VI Contents Chapter 8 Conspecific Recognition Systems and the Rehabilitation of the Biological Species Concept in Ornithology 193 V. S. Friedmann Chapter 9 Species Delimitation: A Decade After the Renaissance 225 Arley Camargo and Jack Jr. Sites Section 3 Historical Issue 249 Chapter 10 Darwin’s Species Concept Revisited 251 David N. Stamos Preface Each branch of knowledge, if it is burdened with at least some portion of metaphysics and natur-philosophy, possesses a kind of “eternal problems”. They are both, “problems” and “eternal” because of the lack of trivial and unambiguous ultimate answers to the funda‐ mental questions such as “what” and “why” are there things of such and such kind in Na‐ ture. Any attempt of escaping them by putting and answering the question “how” and using some operational means, reduces science to technology of counting and measuring. In biology, one of the most fundamental burdens is the species problem; so in this sense, it is actually both the “problem” and “eternal”. This is reflected in the endless stream of pub‐ lications on the species subject, be they either (nature)philosophical issues of the “why” kind (why is there the species), or biological searches of the “what” kind (what are the spe‐ cies of particular organisms), or operational treatments of the “how” kind (how to count the species). In the last decades we have been witnessing appearance of several important landmark papers, monographs and collections on the species problem [1–16] stimulated by new rise of interest of the scientific community to the above old questions of “what” and “why” and occasionally of “how” regarding the species and forming together the problem of the same name. The present book provides another collection of papers on the species problem. It doesn’t pretend neither to be a kind of ‘landmark”, to reflect the current state of the problem in question nor to concentrate on some of its aspects. Rather, this book was initially designed as a forum for exposing ideas, which may provide a look at the species problem not fitting the “recognized” pattern(s). The book includes ten chapters with pretty high theoretical content which are pretty diverse in their subjects; they are divided more or less convention‐ ally between three sections, with most of them being placed in the “Conceptual Issues” sec‐ tion. The “Introductory” section opening the book includes the editor’s (Igor Ya. Pavlinov) chap‐ ter with a self-explaining title “The species problem, why again?“. Its focal point is consid‐ eration of the species problem from the standpoint of the modern non-classical science paradigm, with ontological relativity and subjective inherency being its central themes. Ac‐ cordingly, he concentrates on consideration of this problem in the context of three-parti‐ tioned cognitive situation, within which the entire species problem outlines a conceptual space of certain kind, with particular species concepts being its subspaces allowable to be treated as specific onto-epistemological models. It is stressed that the latter are ordered into a conceptual pyramid of various levels of generality, an “ultimate beginner” of which is supposed to be a kind of synergetic model of the evolving biota. Species ontological plural‐ ism is stressed, which follows from acknowledging gradual divergent evolution of the VIII Preface “specieshood” resulted in the latter’s different manifestations in different groups of organ‐ isms according to their particular life strategies. Richard A. Richards, in his chapter “The species problem: A conceptual problem?”, devel‐ ops some of just above ideas in somewhat more sophisticated manner. His main point is to clarify, whether the species problem is conceptual (theoretical) or empirical one, and his answer is decisively in favor of the first version. Richards consequently considers the prob‐ lem in question from standpoint of the conceptual framework (another term for the above conceptual space), his general attitude is principally monistic. So he asserts it that there is (or should be) a kind of a single general species concept corresponding to some “definition‐ al core” of that framework, with its different aspects belonging to the latter’s “descriptive periphery” corresponding to various particular species concepts. The main theme of Victor P. Shcherbakov’s chapter “Biological species as a form of exis‐ tence, the higher form” is rather naturphilosophical. He tries to explain an emergence and existence of the species of living beings, in its most general meaning, as a particular discrete unit at a particular level of generality within the hierarchically patterned Universe. He in‐ formally defined the species as a multiorganismic self-reproducing entity endowed with a kind of “substantive existence” due to specific interaction of its tokens (organisms). An ulti‐ mate conclusion of the chapter is that the species as a “higher form of existence” emerged in course of historical development of the living matter as an entity possessing, in contrast to particular organisms, a possibility to both change (to evolve) and to remain “itself” (to persist) potentially eternally. The chapter of Kirk Fitzhugh “Defining ‘species,’ ‘biodiversity,’ and ‘conservation’ by their transitive relations” concentrates around consideration of the species as a particular (with no special status) case of the taxon defined as an abductively inferred class of explanatory hypotheses (not ontological individuals) accounting for particular characters distributions among observed organisms. Such a basically epistemological concern of the species leads to a tentative definition of the latter as an explanatory account of occurrences of similar char‐ acter(s) among individuals by way of character origin and subsequent fixation. Interesting is Fitzhugh’s reconsideration of the biodiversity and conservation concepts based on his non-trivial understanding of the species. For him, biodiversity is a metaphor for the hy‐ potheses of taxa (species in particular) as surrogates for hypotheses of the past, proximate tokogeny; this makes the very notion of biodiversity redundant relative to the notion of taxa. Respectively, from such a standpoint, conservation does not “conserve” species or taxa, but ensures that circumscribed sets of organisms would continue tokogeny into the future. James T. Staley begins his chapter “Transitioning toward a universal species concept for the classification of all organisms” with a statement that development of a uniform species con‐ cept that applies to all organisms is one the most important goals in biology. He justly be‐ lieves that, for a species concept to be actually universal, it has to be applied to all and any kinds of organisms including prokaryotes. Taking the latter as a “standard” for considering various species concepts, he comes to a conclusion that the phylogenomic species concept could become accepted as such a sought universal species concept. Larissa Vasilieva’s & Steven L. Stephenson’s chapter “An essentialistic view of the species problem” consider the latter from a typological taxonomic standpoint. They try to re-vital‐ ize an essentialistic view of the species problem, emphasizing (with reference to E. Sober) Preface IX that it is most compatible with the individual treatment of the species. Their general pre‐ sumption is that majority of the existing species concepts are based upon within-species processes and relationships and therefore are inconsistent.